AOptix Brings High-Speed Wireless Optical Networks to Wall Street

More than a decade after its first attempt at breaking into the commercial communications market, wireless optics company AOptix Technologies is finally getting there.

The company makes high-speed wireless networking equipment based on technology that was originally developed for seeing further into space. At the height of the dot-com bubble it tried to sell the equipment as an alternative to building-to-building fiber optic cables.

“We were a technology ahead of its time 12 years ago,” said Dean Senner, AOptix’s chief executive. “When we wanted to give people gigabit links, they couldn’t figure out what to do with them.”

Part of the reason could be that electronic trading of stocks was still in its infancy back then. The company has landed its first commercial customers through a joint venture with Anova Technologies, which will use AOptix boxes to set up a network of links to exchanges for the financial-services industry.

Wireless technologies are ideal for electronic trading because you can develop a network that passes data directly along the shortest route between two points, rather than winding around physical obstacles.

However, the existing wireless technologies–microwave and millimeter wave–have multiple problems. Microwave dishes are big and heavy and millimeter wave gear can’t reach as far, but first and foremost is the weather, said Mike Persico, Anova’s founder.

AOptix Technologies/Strange Media

AOptix’s IntelliMax ULL-3000 optical wireless communications unit.

Certain changes in temperature disagree with microwave and rain causes millimeter-wave technologies to stop working, said Persico, whose sales pitch has been: “Do you want to be 100% faster 80% of the time?” Now with AOptix, wireless links have the same reliability as fiber, he said.

AOptix hasn’t spent the last 12 years waiting for this market to happen. When it was unable to get commercial sales, it ramped up its product development and began selling its technology to the military, where it’s primarily used for providing aircraft with links to the ground that range between 10 gigabits and 80 gigabits per second over distances that span hundreds of kilometers.

More recently it also has sold its technology to enable iris recognition for boarding passengers at airports and for border control.

Anova expects to have a network built on AOptix equipment to link financial institutions in the New York/New Jersey area up and running in the first half of the year. It has already lined up clients for that network which include top-tier Wall Street banks, proprietary trading firms and hedge funds, Persico said.

It’s a big opportunity for AOptix, which sees a bigger opportunity in connecting cellular towers together without fiber-optic cables, said Senner.

“I would hazard a guess that this is the first brand-new piece of wireless equipment in the last 50 years. Everything else has been iterations of something invented decades ago,” said Anova’s Persico.

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